Community:SummerOfCode12

This page lists all the Google Summer of Code 2012 projects with confirmed mentors, and which have been approved by the SoC administrator. New suggestions can be made on the Brainstorming page. This page is locked; contact Gerv with edits.

Potential students: you may choose from the list below, but you do not have to. Feel free to submit a proposal for your own idea. However, before you do so, see the guidelines for good ideas. You can also discuss your ideas or application in the #developers channel on IRC: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#developers . Your idea will have a significantly greater chance of being chosen if you can find an existing member of the Mozilla community who is willing to evaluate or mentor it. (You should name that person in your application.)

In addition to the specifically-named projects below, we have also tagged a number of bugs in Bugzilla with the keyword student-project. However, as the idea of a "student project" is wider than just the Summer of Code, students looking through the list will need to decide whether any particular bug listed there is actually the right size and scope for Summer of Code.

Application Advice

Note that if a project suggests it would be helpful to know XUL (Mozilla's user interface description language), you may be able to get away with learning on the job. Don't be put off from applying if the project otherwise looks right for you.

It is entirely acceptable to apply for 2 or 3 projects, if more than one catches your eye; if the applications are high quality, that probably improves your chances a little. However, more than that seems like spam.

Questions of any sort? Send mail to Gerv and/or chofmann. We will try and respond as soon as possible and get your questions directed to the right person. Please allow at least 48 hours for a reply. If you want to contact a mentor and contact details are not here, ask people in the #developers channel on IRC: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#developers.

Mozilla Platform (Gecko)

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Networking Dashboard

Build a UI for insight into Mozilla Networking. This is really both a Gecko and Firefox project. Show what connections are active, how fast connections have run in the past, what protocols are in use with protocol specific context information (HTTP versions, SPDY, WebSockets), allow management (e.g. shutdown) of particular connections, and even trigger some diagnostic tests.

Skills needed: some C++ for core Gecko, some JS and opportunity to use XUL to build the UI - probably as an add-on initially.

mcmanus

mcmanus plus hopefully a ux sponsor

Improve Support for MathML Tabular Expressions

As you can see on the Mozilla MathML Status page, some work needs to be done on Gecko's tabular math support. The main goal is to fix bug 731667 by rewriting the implementation of the rowalign, columnalign, rowlines and columnlines attributes. As a next step one could work on the support for rowspacing and columnspacing attributes (bug 330964). <mlabeledtr> (bug 689641) and <maligngroup> (bug 122253) are also other interesting elements to consider.

Language: C++.

Frédéric Wang

Frédéric Wang

Better tabular support and more specifically support for the <mlabeledtr> element is important for the MathJax project. Removing private _moz- attributes may allow Gecko to pass more test cases from the html5lib test suite. This will hopefully also fix bug 491384, which has been experimented several times by people who use columnalign to implement LaTeX alignment environments.

Implement MathML 3 Linebreaking

MathML 3 comes with an entirely new description of linebreaking that could greatly improve our linebreaking support in mathematical expressions. A complete implementation may be hard in view of the limited time-frame available, but more modest objectives and incremental steps are proposed in bug 534962.

There is a wealth of information the platform could provide for tools to provide more accurate information about optimizing websites. This project would cover three key areas that have identified - timing data for CSS selector matching, flagging CSS selectors that trigger later-siblings restyles, and timing reflows. This work could be expanded to cover further reflow profiling enhancements, depending on how much time is available, or could be expanded into making use of this new data by exposing it in the existing Firefox Developer Tools with the help of a devtools mentor.

Firefox

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Fullscreen Mode

One upcoming Firefox feature is a fullscreen mode that should provide an immersive experience. This mode will provide a streamlined interface as can be seen in this preliminary mockup. Features such as a clock and other OS indicators might also be part of the project.

The implementation of this feature will mostly involve three languages: XUL, CSS and JS. Great CSS skills are important, and knowledge of XUL is a plus, or at least a good understanding of the different CSS layout models (specially the flexbox model)

Silverfox is the codename of a new feature meant to be an operation mode targeted to beginner users who are being guided on learning how to use the web. In this mode, most settings should be locked down, preventing the user from mistakenly tweaking settings or installing unwanted add-ons. It's not meant to be a

tightly controlled, irreversible-without-password setting, but rather a feature that will make it harder to accidentally break or deteriorate the Firefox experience.
Skills required: good JS skills and ability to work with large codebases

Developer Tools

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Browser Compatibility Warnings

sites like caniuse and html5please provide information about which modern features are available in which browsers. Browser developer tools have the running app in hand and it would be a huge help for many developers if the tools built into Firefox could provide warnings about features being used by their code that are not compatible with the set of browsers that the developer cares about.

kdangoor

CSS Source Maps

Last year, a student implements "source maps" that can take minified JavaScript or even CoffeeScript and map errors back to the original source file(s). We'd like to do the same for CSS which is often minified or generated from languages like LESS or Stylus.

Calendar

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Improve Invitation Support

While Lightning supports invitations, there are still some features that are not supported yet and others that are not quite stable. Possible goals for this project include improving the UI to make sure users are not confused and implementing/adapting code to support previously unsupported features of invitations like delegations or counters. Lightning relies on the itip/imip standard for invitations, which is also used by most other calendaring clients and servers, so an interested student should look into these. Related bugs are bug 420516, bug 426532, bug 445982, bug 538043, bug 720263, bug 624332, and bug 433848. This is not the final list of bugs to be fixed, it is just to give you an idea of what can be done here. A student should specify what they think they can achieve in the time.

Lightning needs to improve its integration into the operating system, most importantly on Windows. If you've ever wanted to double-click on an event to open it in Lightning, this project is for you. Note this might be a bit more tricky than it initially sounds, but you will have the chance to contribute to multiple projects, as some parts of this project could possibly be better solved within Thunderbird or even the Mozilla Platform. To get prepared, see the list of OS Integration bugs, and especially bug 352566.

The Thunderbird ISPDB is an online configuration storage service for email providers. There are a few bugs remaining that the Thunderbird team hasn't had time to fix. It would be nice if we could fix them, and finally get the ISPDB up and running and in use. (If this task was too easy, we could also add in the task of changing Thunderbird to submit working configs to the ISPDB.)

Firefox introduced the concept of app tabs - smaller, fixed tabs that contain a web app. We might want to do something similar for Thunderbird, as a foundation for things like: the Home tab, a Chat app tab, etc... A student applying for this idea should provide some concrete proposals.

Backup and restore of Thunderbird profiles. Should allow users to transfer profiles between machines. Would need to investigate MozBackup and figure out how this would be better. Options about which files to backup would be a start.

Level of difficulty: hard
Skills required: JS, C++, XPCOM, XUL

bienvenu

bienvenu,standard8

Thunderbird Profile Discovery and/or Recovery

Handle things like profiles.ini getting corrupted on upgrade (e.g., try to find a profile dir and hook it back up to profiles.ini), and perhaps profile repair, when accounts get corrupted.

Level of difficulty: medium
Skills required, JS and/or C++

bienvenu

bienvenu,standard8

This is probably relatively easy, but diagnosing and repairing some of the trickier corruptions might be complicated.

Improve Gmail Interoperability

See bug 721316 for more info. The biggest win here is probably avoiding downloading the same message to offline stores and indexing it multiple times, by using X-GM-MSGID. X-GM-THRID may help with threading in gloda, cross-folder views, and even within a folder. There are probably other things we can do to improve our Gmail integration. For example, we could avoid notifying for multiple new messages just because a message has multiple tags.

Level of difficulty: medium to hard, depending on how deep we go here.
Skills required: C++.

bienvenu

bienvenu

Big File Providers

Add other big file providers (e.g., SFTP, Google Docs, WebDAV (for MS SharePoint!)). Students should say which providers they are aiming to support, and why they chose them.

Level of difficulty: medium to hard, depending on the provider API and how well it maps to our provider interface
Skills required: JS

This feature allows the navigation through email attachments. Presented in an additional tab, it offers previews of supported email attachments. It allows full view of the attachment by launching the appropriate registered application or can switch to the email in the email view. Filters allow to the display of attachments of a given type, individual or all folders view. Initially, pictures, PDFs, HTML docs, YouTube/DailyMotion videos should be supported. Other attachments types could be added in core or via plugin. Use Shane's extension as a starting point and figure out how to integrate it into Thunderbird.

System to Configure Android Email Client with Account Settings from Thunderbird

f you want to use email other than Gmail on Android, you have to go through the pain of setting the stock email client with IMAP/POP3 settings, ports, user names, passwords, and other reply & compose settings. This feature would allow you to automatically set your Android device email application with the right parameters. It could take the form of an Android Thunderbird application, or some other more direct parameter settings via device policy infrastructure. Technical investigation would need to be done.

jb

jb?

URL Preview within Thunderbird

Many emails contain links to a single web page. The default TB behaviour is to launch the stock browser to view them. This feature allows direct preview in a Thunderbird tab through ctrl-click, or direct inline preview for known content (e.g.: Youtube...). See bug 661742.

Level of difficulty: medium (easy if initial groundworks is available)

jb

mconley

Compose In A Tab

One way to move the compose window into a tab is to load the Compose window document into a XUL iframe (which is like an HTML iframe, except it hosts XUL). To test this out, install the Developer Assistant extension for Thunderbird, then go to Tools -> Extension Developer -> JavaScript Shell and run the following code:

Then try playing around with it, sending a message, etc. As you can see, the basic concept works, but there are currently issues with the UI. Your job will be to sort them out, make everything work properly, and ship your code as part of Thunderbird.

Level of difficulty: hard.
Skills needed: will require writing XUL (menus will probably need to be moved out into an overlay), JavaScript (passing menu commands down to the child iframe) and CSS (to fix theming issues) and writing unit tests to ensure that things work as expected. Since Mac OS X has a global menu, getting it right might require more work. You will need access to a Mac for your proposal to be accepted..

SeaMonkey

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Shell Service on A Non-Windows Platform

The Mozilla Suite only supported a shell service on Windows, and SeaMonkey has inherited that limitation. Both Firefox and Thunderbird support the shell service on other platforms, so it is technically feasible to implement the shell service for SeaMonkey on those platforms too.

The job of the shell service is to provide OS integration hooks. The full list of hooks is as follows:

It may be possible to make some of these checks optional, however currently as a minimum it must be possible to set SeaMonkey as the default browser and it must be possible to set an image as the desktop wallpaper.

Skills needed: C++; some knowledge of GConf/GIO or Cocoa APIs as appropriate.

This proposal requires some knowledge of platform-specific APIs. Only one platform needs to be implemented by any particular student. I can only give limited support for the Mac but it may be possible to find another mentor.

Messenger Bookmarks

SeaMonkey MailNews provides access not only to mail, but also to NNTP news and even to RSS feeds, and maybe others in future as well. It would be quite useful to be able to bookmark specific news items for later use, e.g. specific postings of a discussion, etc.

This should include full usual bookmark handling for those URLs, including sidebar support.

We provide the ability to create and use message views for pre-filtering which messages to show in the thread pane. We don't have a comparable feature yet in the folder pane...

While this would basically mean porting Thunderbird's bug 251296, the UI should be more in sync with the SeaMonkey look and feel, e.g. columns for unread count, size, etc; a drop down menu for switching views; allow custom folder views; ...

You can filter on quite some terms, but you can't weigh them. A scoring system will allow a much finer control, eg. it would be just a property score with a range of maybe 1..1000, along with some new conditions

The SeaMonkey Composer does not show HTML5 tags in its "All Tags" mode, instead they appear with an unknown tag indicator. It would be nice for the actual tag names to display.

Skills needed: CSS; some graphical ability.

Neil

Neil, possibly IanN

HTML5 Editing

The SeaMonkey Composer does not know how to edit HTML5 tags, except via its generic Advanced Editor. Skills needed: Some HTML5 tags can be supported by adding a XUL/JS dialog, but some may need additional C++ code. Students should specify which tags they plan to implement.

Neil

Neil, possibly IanN

Any given student could just add support for one HTML5 tag of their choice.

Documentation

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SVG Reference Examples

The SVG Reference needs examples! Lots of examples! We need live samples for all the various SVG elements and attributes, examples for how to do cool stuff with SVG in the DOM, etc. The goal would be to have in-line, live SVG samples, with the code and an explanation of how the code works, for every SVG element and attribute.

Skills needed: SVG, DOM, moderate-to-good English writing skills.

Sheppy

Sheppy

Also talk to Jeremie Patonnier about helping with mentoring.

HTML and CSS Reference Examples

The HTML and CSS references on MDN need examples. While there are some here and there, someone needs to go through and ensure that every HTML element has good examples that cover a variety of use cases and interesting capabilities, and that every CSS property has good coverage as well. These would include live examples with the code and an explanation of how it works.

Skills needed: HTML and CSS. Moderate-to-good English writing skills.

Sheppy

Teoli

Add jsFiddle Integration to Kuma

The new Kuma wiki which powers the Mozilla Developer Network needs to have good integration with jsFiddle for easily creating examples then editing, experimenting with, and embedding them into documentation. Should be able to view the source and live output, then experiment with the code in real time (either in place or, perhaps preferably, in a new window).

Foundation

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Slide Drive Improvements

Slide Drive combines the deck.js HTML5 slideshow package with Popcorn.js. It was originally developed for Software Carpentry, but would be useful to many other people who want to move from PowerPoint and recorded video to web-native formats. We now plan to use LibreOffice Impress as a front end to compose slides and choose transition effects: its experimental "export as SVG" feature will create a layered SVG, and by replacing the embedded Javascript, it should be possible to combine its output with Popcorn in Slide Drive. The student tackling this project will need a good understanding of JavaScript and be willing to dive into the SVG format and web audio.

OBI is Mozilla's response to the growing badges in learning movement. The OBI allows learners to collect badges from a variety of badge issuers, and display them wherever they'd like. We need help developing cryptographically signed badges, building additional display widgets, and developing a criteria specification that allows for multiple badges along a learning path. There's lots of work to be done, so we're pretty open to ideas you have. The OBI is written in Javascript, and runs on Node.js, so Javascript knowledge is a big plus. Contact Chris for more information.

Release Engineering

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Tryserver Automation Improvements

The tryserver is Mozilla's system for doing test builds on every platform, even ones you don't have access to. We currently have a 'trychooser' command syntax which allows developers to customize what they'd like to test their patch with (out of over 200 build & test options) - this syntax can use some improvements to allow for even more granular control and also needs a web-driven interface as well as logic that would let users specify a repo (mozilla-hosted), a custom test package, and much more. Bugs include try_enhancement tracking and most importantly bug 625463

Instantbird

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Account Import Wizard

Goal: Ease the pain of switching to Instantbird

Lots of users don't try a new IM client only because they don't want to spend time reconfiguring all their IM accounts. Being able to import accounts from other clients installed on the system would help Instantbird adoption. The student should focus on the dominant IM clients (Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ...) and on the other multi network IM clients (Digsby, Pidgin, Trillian, Miranda, ...). The student will need to study the way other IM clients store their profile data (reverse engineering may be required), think of an architecture to share as much code as possible between the various import modules, and implement import modules for some clients. Students should propose particular IM clients they plan to implement support for.

Skills needed: JavaScript XPCOM, XUL, maybe some reverse engineering.

Florian Quèze

Florian Quèze

Protocol-Aware Error Console

Goal: Create a tool letting developers (and users) see what was exchanged for each account at the protocol level.

A student working on this project will either extend the existing Error Console or create a new console from which it will be possible to see what data has been exchanged for each account. Example of desirable features: copying a log of whatever happened with an account from the beginning of the connection attempt; syntax highlighting of the exchanged data (requires some parsing of the data exchanged by protocols like XMPP, IRC, Twitter (JSON)); letting the user type and send a raw message to the server.

This project intends to explore the possibilities for Voice and Video communication using the Mozilla platform. The student will need to experiment both with usage of the microphone and webcam and with codecs available in the system on the three supported OSes. Compatible implementations of the various IM protocols that support these features is out of the scope of this project, but the student will at least need to prove that s/he has seriously investigated using the various open source projects that have started some work on this. A (mostly) working proof of concept is expected. UI mockups for what a well-thought user interface for voice and video could be would be appreciated.

Skills needed: JavaScript, XUL, XPCOM, maybe C++.

Florian Quèze

Florian Quèze

Security Engineering

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User-Specified Content Security Policy

Currently, a website can decide to mitigate attacks on their pages and their users by defining and implementing a Content Security Policy. However, users have no way of protecting themselves in cases where their favorite websites aren't using CSP. This project is to develop a Firefox add-on that allows users to specify Content Security Policies for sites (i.e. don't ever iframe my bank website, don't allow inline script on my blog, etc). If time allows, the add-on could also monitor websites the user visits frequently to determine a default CSP policy for each site. Give the user the option to apply that policy to the website and potentially protect themselves from future exploits on the site caused by current or future vulnerabilities.

Tanvi

Tanvi

Prevent Tracking via HTTP Basic Auth

Currently a website can track users by setting requests to their resources (advertising) using URLs that contain authentication attributes. Sites then can use these attributes to track users between sites (and avoid the need to set up cookies or other storage). This project will enhance Firefox so that this type of tracking cannot be done and to determine how much this happens in practice. The two goals for this project are: Enhance the collusion add-on to include this type of tracking and change Firefox so that a preference exist so that the only HTTP Auth headers that get cached are the ones entered manually by the user.

cviecco

cviecco

SPDY and WebsSocket Testing Tools

HTTP is old and busted, SPDY and WebSockets are the new hotness. Unfortunately there are no really good tools for performing manual and automated security testing for these protocols (aside from protocol fuzzing). We need a brilliant candidate who can work with us to create some new tools that fit in with the asynchronous nature of these protocols while allowing testers to adapt manual / intercepting proxy oriented testing techniques. In particular, an existing tool such as OWASP Zap should be updated to support both interception, and streaming modifications to request contents.

Yvan Boily

Yvan Boily

Emscripten

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Port Any Open Source C/C++ Project To The Web

Emscripten lets us compile C and C++ to JavaScript. Porting a project involves building it with Emscripten and fixing any problems along the way (changes to makefiles, implementing missing library support in Emscripten) as well as analyzing the generated code and seeing how to optimize the code for the web. Any interesting open source C or C++ codebase would be a good project to work on here, some examples: GTK, Qt, SuperTux, PyPy, etc. Students will need to specify in their application which codebase they plan to port, and why it would be useful.

Skills needed: C or C++ depending on the project, some JS, some familiarity with the project being ported, other technologies if the project uses it (for example, for a game that uses OpenGL, OpenGL would be needed)

Alon Zakai

Alon Zakai

Localization

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System for Standardization of Localization Terms

During Localization a need is felt for standardization of translation of words during localization. As of now lack of an exhaustive list of standardized usage leads to various problems for l10n contributors. The idea is to create an exhaustive database for entries with their corresponding suggested translation. This should also work with small phrases. This project aims at creating a tool which uses MT based on existing work. Simply put the idea is to take the existing l10n work an put it through a statistical machine translation system like Moses. Based on this a list is created with preferred translations for the English words. Corrections to this are made if any. Organize it into a database of sorts and design a small web portal that will help people contributing to l10n find words and preferred translations real easy. This will be done for all languages. In addition to this quality of suggestions for existing strings compared to localized strings will be checked and find if any inconsistencies exist in the localized strings

Gautam Akiwate <gautam.akiwate@gmail.com>

Phillipe D (with Alex Hecht)

Open Web Apps

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Native Webapps Support on Linux

The Native Webapps feature in Firefox permits a webapp to be installed in the OS and launched as a separate process in a standalone window and environment. Currently this support exists for Windows and OSX, and the goal of this project would be to bring the same support for Linux desktop, specifically for Gnome. The work consists in two pieces:

support for the standalone runtime that runs the webapps, and support for the installation process that installs them to the OS.
Skills needed: knowledge of Linux desktops, specially GTK APIs, is required, and good C++ and JS skills.

This proposal requires knowledge of platform-specific APIs, namely GTK2. Knowledge of the Mozilla codebase is not required but is a plus. Great C++ and JS skills is a plus.

Sample Open Web App demonstrating AppCache

Create a sample Open Web App that will show HTML5 developers how AppCache makes an App that launches quickly and repeatably, even in the face of bad or missing network connections (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Offline_resources_in_Firefox). Examples could include eBook readers or WebGL-based games. Code should be exceptionally readable and well-documented.

Bill Walker (bwalker@mozilla.com)

Bill Walker (bwalker@mozilla.com)

'PDF eBook Reader' Web App

Create an eBook reader for the Mozilla Marketplace based around PDF.js. This App should allow users to (1) manage a library of PDF's found on the net and (2) provide a pleasant full-screen reading experience. Extra credit for implementing bookmarks and sharing or other social features. Ideally, this App would work well on tablets, phones and desktops.